Again, where are we now? Some of these pictures feel like they were taken yesterday, but the past few weeks have flown by, as is normal. It’s July, and not only that, we have so much going on in July that it feels like the cusp of August. The other night we went to San Francisco for an event at the Maker Media Lab at the old Exploratorium location, and the event was perfect – hands-on activities, fun things to look at, a dog wearing light up pants, Amici’s pizza and beer – yet our kids were glued to the pinball machine. The machine made their night. When we left, it was still light, and we decided to go across the street to Crissy Field, where we had the beach to ourselves, if you didn’t count the few photographers down beach with cameras on tripods pointed at the Golden Gate Bridge, hoping that the fog would back off for the sunset. That may have been the best hour of the summer.

The summer has been work, camp for the kids, camp for my work, lunch at Sunset Magazine, the above mentioned Maker Camp kick off event, Trixie’s first Fourth of July (not bothered by fireworks, but very bothered by not getting any s’mores), planning upcoming vacations, and a general freak out about how fast time is slipping away. Our school summers are long; this year the kids don’t go back until Sept. 14 and 15. This gives us plenty of time for summer and a late vacation after everyone else is back in school. However, it’s a little sad knowing that this is our last year and that next year, with high school in our future, summer will abruptly end in mid-August.

The turtle picture seems to symbolize something, but I haven’t yet figured out what. While working at the start of the summer. I saw a turtle a few feet away from a pond. I slowly approached, trying my best not to startle the turtle with a fast movement, and as I edged forward, I zoomed in with my camera and took the photo. This was the happiest turtle I’d ever met! As I backed away, I noticed the turtle had never moved at all, so I moved back closer and closer until I could finally see it was made of stone. I spent 10 minutes stalking a stone turtle. All I could do was laugh.

My Christmas gift arrived this week! It’s a Herman Miller Eames rocking chair that I fell in love with a few months ago at an event at a San Francisco incubator. They had this colorful wall and in front of it was a long wood table with about 20 different colored rockers. My new fear is that it will scratch our flooring through aggressive use by the kids, which means we should get an area rug for the space, which means we need to get Trixie fully trained so that she doesn’t ruin a new rug. Everything is connected and it all leads to more work. We did order a new rug for our family room to replace the exact same rug we have there, but the company sent the wrong rug and for a minute, I was hoping they’d let us keep it because the rug was inexpensive and it barely survived UPS ground across country to get here. Amazon has spoiled me with their customer service when they make a mistake and I forgot that not all companies handle customer service the same way. This would solve the living room floor issue, but this wasn’t Amazon and the rug company wanted it back, so I’m back to square one. (Also, they won’t ship us the correct rug we ordered because they don’t do exchanges, even when it is their fault. I need to figure out my rug needs and reorder. I would link to the company, but their customer service has been remarkably horrible. Yet the prices are so good…) Back to the chair – there is no way to feel unhappy while in it. I love it so much. Trixie was concerned about a moving chair, but once she realized it wasn’t coming after her, she accepted it into her world.

Middle age arrived this week in the form of reading glasses. I was one of the many people at the eye doctor just before the end of the year to use up my vision benefits. I was told I was right on the border of needing glasses, which makes these pretty much a glorified version of what I could buy at a drugstore. They make me feel like a responsible adult, so I wear them. When I remember.

Trixie needs a special shampoo for her sensitive skin that requires it sit on her for 10 minutes of marinating. This is the longest 10 minutes of her life, maybe because it is 70 minutes in dog time? I sit in there with her, singing a modified version of Rubber Ducky – Snuggle Puppy, instead – while counting down the minutes. She looks at me with a face that is ready for one of those sad commercials with a Sarah McLaughlin soundtrack. Afterward, she gets treats and a warm towel in front of the fire, but that doesn’t stop her from cycling through sadness, trying to escape, and accusing looks of betrayal during the world’s longest 10 minute bath.

One great success of the week was that I brought out the camera instead of my iPhone. Part of that may have been because I needed to bring it to a construction site for work and once it is out, the barrier to actually using it is removed. As always, baby steps toward goals!

This week wasn’t the first step forward on the year that I’d wanted. Everything seemed a little rushed, a little reactive instead of proactive. We looked at schools (does this aspect of modern parenthood ever end?), went to work, went to meetings, ate crappy pizza, and read some books, which is good because work is about to amp up for about seven weeks, leaving little time for nothing else.

I made a list of goals for 2015 and I’ve already failed on some. I drank Diet Coke today, I didn’t wear my Fitbit at all and while that means it can’t be verified, I know I walked nowhere. I took zero photos with my real camera. The subject line of an email on our neighborhood list asked for recommendations on “a helper to deal with stuff.” We all can use one of those, too. (My favorite local email subject line of all time was mom looking for an air conditioned stroller for walks on warm days. #firstworldproblem for sure.)

The good news is that I had a dinner out with friends that we’d been trying to get scheduled for weeks, I spent a fun day with my niece, and I drove some of the school cross country team to get bibs for their first race. Baby steps or something like that.

Hey, so there is no way of avoiding that the last time I posted here was in May. Posting again was always on my list of things to do, but it would get buried until it was so deep down that I figured this blog had suffocated and died. I almost wrote that Schrodinger’s Cat is dead, but that would reveal that I did find the time to watch Big Bang Theory reruns on a nightly loop. And I don’t want to reveal that.

At dinner on New Year’s Eve, I brought the memory jar to the table. You know, the highly pinned idea that throughout the year, your family make note of important or fun events by writing them on a scrap of paper and placing in a jar to be revisited at the end of the year? We started strong! I cut scraps of fancy paper and found the perfect jar. I was doing Pinterest proud! But then we all forgot about it until New Year’s Eve when I dumped out the two sad and lonely notes.

The upside is that we’d all forgotten about that LEGO The Hobbit game party.

It wasn’t only the jar, it was really our year. When I made our end of year photo books, there was a surprising lack of photos for the first half of the year. It looks like the year starts at Easter, and there must be some truth to that because when everyone was posting those end of year Facebook movies, I looked at mine and sure enough, Facebook started my year in April, with most of the action taking off in August. You can’t argue with an algorithm.

What happened? Work happened. 2014 was the year of serious work. I worked A LOT, which meant every minute was scheduled from 5:45 a.m. to 11:15 p.m. Work came before everything, and even Facebook’s year-end video noticed. This year’s challenge is making sure that doesn’t happen again by wedging more fun into the schedule. Scheduled fun. It’s going to be less lame than it sounds.

This week is always my favorite of the year, the low-key week between Christmas and the New Year when no one works or if they do work, they don’t expect much to happen. It’s quiet and lazy and perfect for introspection and planning. And for dealing with allergy issues for a super special puppy, whom the vet tech called, “The best type of high maintenence.”

This is the face of a dog who doesn’t know her immediate future includes an ear wash and a 10 minute bath with medicated shampoo.

Last year’s theme song was Paramore’s Real World. This year we’re going in with Gwen Stefani’s Spark the Fire. Who got the lighter? Let’s spark the fire…so that we can snuggle with Trixie where it’s cozy.

My goal for this year is to post a weekly journal of sorts. I’ve loved following Modchik/Lindsey Garrett’s year and it inspired me to help meet some of my resolutions with a similar post here.

I’ve created quite a nest for myself today, surrounded by magazines, phones, a computer and TV, while I rule the roost from my bed. It’s like bed rest without the power that accompanies a medical order. My goal for Mother’s Day was to read my backlog of magazines, when really I’ve only made it through some blogs on Feedly and a CB2 catalog that has been dogeared up by someone else in this house.

One unadvertised benefit of our awesome bed is that the headrest doubles as a drink holder/shelf. It’s a fantastic feature because it keeps your drink accessible without forcing you to lean over to reach the nightstand, causing your carefully constructed pile of pillows to fall out of position. It was perfect until today when one of the pillows nicked a half full glass of lemonade, dumping the contents everywhere. I jumped up, grabbed a towel, and began wiping when I sat down on the bed to reach the floor board in between the nightstand and bed. First I heard beeps, then a weird muffled sound in the house. Only after I looked accusingly at the TV did I realize that I had sat on the phone and had butt dialed the phone intercom system. My clean up was broadcast house-wide. Still more entertaining than the Kardashians.

This came while watching a Dodgers game where they showed a mom in the crowd who looked topless, super tan, and on display while her son tried to get her attention. I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt that she was wearing a tube top and wasn’t topless, but I can’t be certain. She did make me think of Tom Papa’s take on hot moms:

The best news of Mother’s Day and the continuation of my love-hate with online quizzes: I am Lorelei Gilmore.

It’s like Google turned over secret information on me because I LOVE Gilmore Girls. I even watched a few of the early episodes with Clover until someone in this house complained that I was hogging the Netflix spots. Rory’s high school graduation still makes me cry, especially her mention of how she inhabits two worlds – one of books and one of real life – because that is Clover, too.

Clover’s softball team lost in the playoffs yesterday due to a horrible call. I know, one call isn’t an entire game of play, but this one call really did cost them the game and it hurts so much more when your team wasn’t outplayed, but beat by a blind naccoleptic clustercuss umpire. And, it hurts so much more when the game is your child’s and not your own. This loss stung more than any I remember from my childhood. Clover didn’t say much, and as we drove away, she finally said that the worst of it was that she felt “especially bad” for one of her teammates. This girl was involved in the bad call play, and I thought that may be the reason Clover felt bad for her, but I was wrong. “It’s just that she’s always so positive and optimistic, and at the end, she was crying.”